Part 1

• Indonesian cinema of the 1950s: What do we see? Peter Keppy Radboud University / NIOD Institute for War

  Motion pictures created by Indonesians in the 1950s addressing contemporary social issues of the period offer a challenging case to discuss the merits and limits of film fiction as historical source. By situating the newly emerging Indonesian film industry, filmmakers and their creative products in the social, economic and political context of the early 1950s, film content starts to gain social-historical meaning.
  To highlight the potential of film as historical source, I will turn to a few extant films dealing with a tenacious social issue in post-colonial Indonesia in the immediate wake of the National Revolution (1945-1949): the return to society of hundreds of thousands of former freedom fighters.
  As a source for social-historical enquiry, film fiction is as problematic as official documents, newspapers or literature. Film fiction is however a largely untapped yet potentially rich and exciting yet source for students of modern Indonesian history.

• Migrant Women and the Sinosphere: Rethinking Singaporean Society through Cinema Siao Yuong Fong King's College London

  This paper maps the figure of the mainland Chinese migrant woman in Singapore cinema from 1997 to 2025 to examine how the rise of China and the reconfiguration of the Sinosphere have reshaped Singaporean identity, film practice, and regimes of representation. Drawing on a corpus of ten feature films and their paratexts, we theorize the figure of the mainland Chinese migrant woman in Singapore cinema (1997–2025) as a constitutive outside through which Singaporeanness is differentially produced, contested, and recalibrated in the wake of China’s rise and the reconfiguration of the Sinosphere. We read this figure as a gendered and racialized site where co-ethnicity, migration, and geopolitical power in Singapore are negotiated within shifting regimes of representation.
  We trace a set of transformations in which the migrant woman is variously rendered as caricatured excess, co-ethnic double, and object of self-yellowface, before being rearticulated as a legible subject of realist empathy and, more recently, as a figure of market-oriented inclusion. Periodizing the corpus into three conjunctures, we foreground how aesthetic strategies and affective economies mediate the tension between national boundary-making and transnational incorporation. We situate these representational shifts within evolving industrial conditions, including co-production incentives, the expansion of the Chinese market, and platform consolidation, all of which shape what stories can be told and circulated. Our analysis demonstrates that representations of the mainland Chinese migrant woman both expose the contingency of Singaporeanness and increasingly enable transnational circulation by aligning cinematic empathy with soft power logics and market imperatives across the Sinosphere.
  As the first systematic account of this figure in Singapore feature cinema, this paper offers a way to cinematically read how gendered migrant bodies become key sites for negotiating Singapore’s entanglement with China and the ongoing rearticulation of national and regional identities.

• Bleeding Bodies, Roaring Spirits: Reclaiming the Female Muslim Body in Malaysian Horror Hui Yan Chew Aichi Shukutoku University

  Tiger Stripes (2023), an eight-country co-production and the directorial debut of Malaysian filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu, navigates the intersection of body horror, Southeast Asian folklore, and the supernatural to dissect taboo subjects surrounding female Muslim puberty and menstruation. The film centers on 11-year-old Zaffan, whose body undergoes unsettling transformations upon the onset of puberty—ranging from decaying nails and hair loss to a full metamorphosis into a tailed creature with predatory impulses.
  This paper adopts a multidisciplinary framework to analyze the film. First, it draws on May Adadol Ingawanij (2022)’s conceptualization of animism as a modern political tool to argue that the film’s use of folklore is not merely archaic, but a contemporary strategy to disrupt the state’s rationalized religious hegemony. Complementing this, the study utilizes Julia Kristeva’s abjection (1982) to examine how Zaffan’s visceral physical transformation functions as a cinematic apparatus to subvert conventional horror tropes, re-framing the “monstrous” female body as a site of emancipated power.
  Expanding beyond psychoanalytic framing, the paper introduces a posthumanist perspective through Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) concept of “becoming-animal.” This lens re-reads the film’s climax—Zaffan’s flight into the jungle—not as an exile, but as a liberation. In this state, the school’s shame and the state’s surveillance no longer apply. Furthermore, the research investigates how the “third space” of social media allows the female Muslim body to contest patriarchal gaze, deconstructing the image of the “passive” Malaysian woman.
  Finally, the study addresses the film’s transnational trajectory. Despite winning the Grand Prize at Cannes, Tiger Stripes faced significant domestic censorship. This tension underscores a haunting irony: the film’s success relies on the global consumption of the “exotic” rebellious Asian female, even as the local state apparatus attempts to invisibilize her.

• Ghosts as Intervention: Negotiating Thai Politics through Voices of Queers and Ghosts in A Useful Ghost (2025) Daranee Thongsiri National Chung Hsing University

  Written and directed by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke in 2025, A Useful Ghost negotiates socio-political issues in Thailand through voices of queer people and ghosts. In this film, ghosts become a symbol of the people who have participated in political movements against the Thai authority, ruled by the monarchy and military regime (since the emergence of the democracy movement dating from the Siamese revolution of 1932 until after the coup d’état of 2014). The film not only captures the history of Thai politics but also demonstrates how cinematic art can serve as an important tool for documenting narratives that are forced to disappear.
  This paper explores the ways in which A Useful Ghost can create a space for understanding the democracy movement in Thai society today. While the democracy movement was started by a group of young men, it later became an intersectionality movement led by groups such as queers, laborers, and young people. Using the voice of a ghost within a vacuum machine to tell a story about environmental issues, labor rights, political rights, and sexual rights, A Useful Ghost is a piece of cinematic art that intervenes in sensitive socio-political issues that cannot be articulated under the current regime. In so doing, the voice of the queer ghost bespeaks the governmental censorship and serves as an alternative tool for reclaiming historical memory denied by the government in the mass media.

• Waves, Wayang and Wayfinding through Patani Sapphic Cinema Kukasina Kubaha University of Hamburg

  She’s standing there, facing the tides. The story between her and the artist had to come to an end, or perhaps not. Seen through the mirror that is placed there strategically on the beach, Shati, the film’s protagonist gets a glimpse of what life could have been if she had decided to anchor herself in the sea of non-compulsory heteronormativity. Yet, as Patiparn Boontarig, director of the movie Solids by the Seashore (2023) had panned out, Shati would go on and marry a good Muslim guy. The waves of her sapphic past would just be washed away. This paper aims to put this feature film i conversation with Samak Kosem’s short films, A Thin Veil (2018), By the Shore of the Sea (2019), ‘Not waving but drowning (2022) Through the space of film, the waves in all these moving images not only serve as metaphor of gender and sexuality, but they are also characters in their own right. These movies, with all their cultural significance, also mirrors the historical tradition of Indonesian-Malaysian Wayang culture in bringing together community, and expressing nuances of histories. By drawing parallels of Wayang and the Phantasmagoria, I attempt to show how Southeast Asian cinema culture holds making kin and community building at its heart, while also serving as a method of ethnographic wayfinding.

Part 2

• AI Colonialism in Vietnamese Podcast Practices Anh Dinh-Hong University College London

  This empirical research provides an insight into how Vietnamese podcasters have used AI in their podcast practice in recent years and the implications of AI colonialism. The findings are based on the data collected from interviews with 15 Vietnamese podcasters from January to April 2025 in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Using AI to find niche content ideas for podcast episodes” and “Automatic noise removal” are the two most popular applications that the participants mentioned in the interviews. In terms of content, most of them shared that they used ChatGPT to find suggestions for ideas, topics, and content for their podcast episodes. Some people used the suggested ideas from this Chatbot directly, but others only “considered them as a reference, like finding a big idea,” and then they will “dig deeper and come up with specific niche content that suits their own orientation, desires, and target audience.” In terms of technical support, not many podcasters use AI in audio editing. However, two interviewees, Trung Hiếu & Hồng Phúc, shared that they have used AI editing tools to automatically filter out background noise in their audio files.
  Podcast production in Vietnam is now increasingly involved with AI recommendation engines, AI content generation plugins, and editing tools. Today’s tech giants have engineered an extractive form of discriminatory algorithms that builds a new social order (Mejias&Couldry, 2024) and a new form of colonialism: AI colonialism. In the context of Vietnam, there are three implications that are worth further discussing. (1) Podcasts may increasingly shift toward dominant languages, threatening linguistic diversity, and podcasters may depend on Western-built tools for editing, translation, scriptwriting, and distribution (Mignolo & Bussmann, 2023). (2) AI is shaping the way of cultural thinking. Media output is less culturally diverse (Cave&Dihal, 2020). (3) Creativity becomes platform-dependent, narrowing imagination and reducing creative autonomy of the country.

• Exploring Zomia’s worldviews: the example of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues Liying Zhou Universidad Complutense de Madrid

  We take as an example the film Kaili Blues (2015) by Chinese director Bi Gan, which serves as an analytical tool for the Guizhou region of southwest China. This region boasts some of the greatest ethnic diversity in the country and is a constituent part of what theorists have named Zomia: the highland region of southwest China, northeast India, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, which has historically remained outside the control of the surrounding nation- states. James Scott, in his work The Art of Not Being Governed, identifies this area as the “Southeast Asian Highlands,” whose high altitude and mountainous terrain hindered the expansion of the Han Empire.
  The film, through magical realism, portrays the coexistence of modernity with ancestral animistic and Buddhist beliefs. In Bi Gan’s film, a 41-minute single-shot sequence presents a worldview in which time is conceived differently from the modern one. Instead of a linear timescale, we are shown a circular space-time where past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. This is expressed in the film, which shows the main character, Chen, searching for his lost nephew, Wei Wei, and stopping in a place called Dangmai, supposedly inhabited by the Miao ethnic group. There, blurring the lines between reality and dreams, the character encounters figures from his past, such as his deceased wife, alongside figures from the future, like Bao Bao, now a teenager.

• Exploring Collective Memory through Film: Examples from Southeast Asian Independent cinema Álvaro Miguel Malaina Martín Universidad Complutense de Madrid

  Taking Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy as a theoretical framework, we present cinema as more than just fictional entertainment, but as an alternative form of thinking, especially in its modern formulation as “time-image” (Deleuze, 1985) rather than i its classic formulation as “movement-image” (Deleuze, 1983). “Time-image”, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and reflecting on history and memory, can be complementary to rational thought, which can serve social science in exploring social realities, Applied to the field of study of Southeast Asian societies, we will provide examples of how cinema reflects on collective memory and historical trauma in societies of the region.
  We will use the following films as examples: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, By the Time It Gets Dark (2016) by Anocha Suwichakornpong, and Viet and Nam (2024) by Truong Minh Quy. Specifically, following Deleuze’s approach, the focus will be on how these examples of “time-image” “think” about persistent traumas, such as the Thai army’s repression of communist guerrillas in Isaan, the massacre of students at Thammasat University, and the disappearances during the Vietnam War. It will be shown how, by converging realism and surrealism, these films sensorially and emotionally explore the intersections between the traumatic past, the uncertain present, and the still hopeful future, becoming invaluable working documents for scholars of the region’s societies.

• Adat, Gender, and Subtle Resistance: From Power Arena to Contestation of Meaning in the Film Pangku Dina Diana Universitas Indonesia

  This paper examines the film Pangku as a framework for understanding the interplay between tradition, morality, and economic necessity in a socio-cultural context shaped by adat (local custom). Set in the northern coastal region of West Java in the post-Reformasi era, the film portrays the practice of warung kopi pangku, where women serve coffee while sitting on the laps of male customers. This practice reveals the intersection of gender, economics, and customary norms in a marginalized coastal community.
  The study approaches adat not as a fixed tradition, but as a dynamic socio-legal process in which power relations, moral expectations, and material conditions are intertwined. In Pangku, practices presented as customary or morally justified are closely connected to economic pressures and social vulnerability.
  Particular attention is given to women’s bodies as the site where tradition, morality, and economic necessity converge. Women are placed within a system that both assigns them moral responsibilities and subjects them to social control. These conditions generate subtle forms of resistance that are neither fully compliant nor openly defiant, raising the question of whether such actions are forms of structural coercion or survival strategies.
  This paper argues that they are both. While shaped by structural constraints, women’s actions also reveal agency within limited possibilities, challenging a simple opposition between victimhood and empowerment. Gender inequality is thus not an isolated condition, but one legitimized and reproduced through customary practices that naturalize hierarchy.
  At the same time, Pangku shows that adat is not static. Through everyday acts of compliance, reinterpretation, and subtle deviation, women help reshape its meaning. The film suggests that social change occurs not only through formal reform, but also through daily practices that gradually transform social norms, especially as women begin to move beyond disadvantage and seek greater economic independence.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• AI
• AI colonialism
• Adat
• Deleuze
• Indonesia
• Kaili Blues
• Patani
• Thailand
• Tiger Stripes
• Time-Image
• Vietnam
• Zomia
• abjection
• becoming-animal
• cinema
• economic necessity
• ethnography
• female body politics
• film
• film analysis
• gender
• ghosts
• historiography
• intersectionality
• media
• methodology
• morality
• podcast
• political animism
• political movement
• queer
• sapphic cinema